Featured filmmaker and actor Scott McMahon and I met on a Google+ filmmaker community. We’d happily exchanged comments and shared posts for several months. Then one day, Scott shared a post about filming in the extreme cold conditions on Mt Hood and I realized that Scott lives in Portland, Oregon, same as me. It’s always fun to take a social media relationship into real life. We have a lot in common; we’re both trying to help artists become better business people. I appeared on his FilmTrooper.com podcast series: http://filmtrooper.com/026-cynthia-kahn-amused-now-dot-com/ Now, he’s a featured artist on Amused Now. Before moving to Portland, Scott McMahon lived in Los Angeles. He went to film school, made several films, and was hired by Sony PlayStation to make cinematic movies for their platform. After he left Sony PlayStation, Scott tried to produce an independent comedy, but the economy had tanked. Fortunately, Scott discovered “there could be a way to make films anywhere and sell them online using online business and marketing techniques.” For the past few years, Scott’s been trying to figure out how to do just that. Unfortunately, after working at Sony PlayStation, Scott had a big budget mindset. He’d write a scene and realize, “This is too expensive. I just wrote a scene that’s going to cost a half million dollars. It was a big challenge creatively to try and go smaller.” Scott McMahon recently released a feature film called The Cube. He created the film on a $500 budget without a professional crew. The Cube is a spiritual story about a couple who finds a red cube on their doorstep and throws it away. The idea came on the night of his wife’s birthday. Scott decided to forget about all the stress at work and just...